What a loyalty programme really costs in Morocco

Most comparisons stop at the subscription price. It is the most visible line and often the smallest. A loyalty programme costs four things, and three of them appear on no invoice.

1. The tool

This is the easy line. In Morocco, a digital loyalty platform sits between a few hundred and a few thousand dirhams a month depending on the number of locations and the message volume. At Fedelio, the first plan is 500 MAD per month excluding tax; the detail is on the Pricing page.

If you stay with cardboard, this line drops to a few hundred dirhams of printing a year. Hold on to that, we will come back to it.

2. Messages — the line that surprises

This is where budgets go off the rails, because the unit cost is ridiculous and the volume is not.

Apple Wallet and Google Wallet notifications are free. Apple and Google do not charge for updating a pass. You can notify every customer on every visit without ever looking at an invoice. It is the most underestimated point on the subject.

WhatsApp, on the other hand, is charged per message. Meta applies two rates: a follow-up message — stamp confirmation, reward earned — costs on the order of a few centimes of a dirham; a promotional message costs several times more, the order of magnitude being six to eight times the first.

The practical conclusion is simple: put the routine through the wallet and keep WhatsApp for what deserves it. A confirmed stamp does not deserve to interrupt someone; a reminder after six weeks away does.

3. The reward given away

Everyone forgets this one, and it is often the biggest. It is easy to work out.

Take the cost price of what you give away — the ingredients, not the selling price — and multiply by the number of rewards handed out each month. A coffee whose ingredients cost four dirhams, given away fifty times in the month, is two hundred dirhams. That is modest, and it is precisely why coffee is a good reward.

Redo the sum with a dish costing thirty dirhams in ingredients, given away fifty times: fifteen hundred dirhams a month. The reward then becomes your largest line of spending, well ahead of the tool.

4. The team's time

A few seconds per customer, on every visit. Taken on its own, it is nothing. At peak times, it is the only thing that decides whether your programme lives or dies.

A system that requires finding a record, retyping a number or opening slow software will be abandoned by your team within two weeks — without anyone telling you. The only criterion that counts at the till: does it fit in one gesture?

The full calculation, on an example

A café with three hundred enrolled customers, fifty rewards handed out per month, and two monthly reminders sent only to inactive customers — say sixty people.

Now the other side of the calculation. If that programme brings twenty customers back one extra time in the month, at an average basket of thirty dirhams, that is six hundred dirhams of extra takings — and it does not take much more than that to cover the whole thing.

That is the number to track, and it alone: how many customers come back more often than before. Not the number of sign-ups, which tells you nothing — an enrolled customer who never comes back has cost you without bringing anything in.

The three budgeting mistakes

• Counting only the subscription. It is often the smallest of the four lines.
• Sending by WhatsApp what the wallet does for free. The difference runs to hundreds of dirhams a month, for a customer who sees no difference at all.
• Choosing a reward with a high cost price. A product with a low cost and a high perceived value is better for you *and* for the customer.

Before signing anything, work out those four lines with your own numbers. If the total looks bearable and you know which indicator you will be looking at in a month, you can go ahead. Otherwise, start with cardboard and work on the threshold.